How to Use Real-Time Marketing With 4 Simple Steps

Real-time marketing is a relatively new trend in the digital marketing sphere. Marketers now have the ability to connect with their audience in real-time. Brands have an entire team laid out just to take advantage of consumer’s interest in current events.

The most famous real-time marketing example in recent memory is the quick-response “You Can Still Dunk in the Dark” ad from Oreo right after the lights went out during Super Bowl XLX back in February. The market response was phenomenal and launched a frenzy of “Likes” and tweets on social networking sites.

Since then, a lot of marketers have examined the “Oreo dunk” moment and have come up with various methods to replicate the success. However, the success in real-time marketing doesn’t just come in one heap. You need to build small steps on a day-to-day basis to reach the summit. Gather your audience and share a snippet or two with them daily to build a conversational tone between them and the brand; and when the big moment strikes, be ready to take advantage of the opportunity.

The tone of your conversations must resonate with the target audience. The only way to achieve that is by churning out highly creative, concentrated and relevant content in a short amount of time.

Now, the question arises: how to use real-time marketing effectively? Here are a few steps to make sure that you do it properly:

1. Gather Your Team, Resources and Processes

This is the elementary step that you have to take to gather your team, resources and processes in place. The team should have ample flexibility, which would give them the much-needed time and skills to become deeply involved with the community they’re targeting. This would also allow them to be more authentic and be trusted by the audience.

Apart from the content creators and distributors, the process planning team should also be integrated with the marketing team. This would streamline the creative product and make quick decisions and approvals possible. It is possible that you may not get this perfect the first time around. Talk to your employees to see which difficulties they’re facing and the processes that are hindering their productivity. Integrate every necessary process into one team and make sure that various parts of the team are able to communicate and collaborate effectively.

2. Analyze and Pinpoint Your Target Audience

This is an important step in any marketing strategy. Identifying the target audience should be relatively easy, but finding out their interests and pinpointing how your brand plays a role in their lives is a challenge.

For example, a sports shoe brand should attempt to target marathons, running competitions, triathlons and other sporting events. If an event organizer notices that your brand’s hashtag is trending on social media, then they might also share it and give your brand a much-needed boost in visibility. Always make sure that you create content that is highly relevant to the community which your brand attracts.

3. Keep a Close Eye on the Market

Your real-time marketing team should be able to monitor news, daily events, trending topics, sub-topics, influences and habits of your marketing space. Try to target the influencers, the ones who push others towards your brand. You should also be able to predict the quirks and habits of your audience to stay one step ahead of them.

Automatic social media analytics and publishing tools can be used to react quickly to trending words or key phrases as they’re gaining momentum. Relevant content is the key to the heart of the consumer in real-time marketing.

4. Generate High-Quality and Relevant Content Regularly

The only way to attract the attention towards your brand is to generate high-quality and relevant content in a short amount of time. Create campaigns, retweet trending topics or engage with other popular brands and pages to stay pertinent.

Your first priority should be to build content, and then your second priority should be build conversations around it. Finally, the most important function must be to create social ads around the content and conversations.

Engaging your community with discussions, debates and competitions is also another method to keep the visitors coming back to your brand. Always remember to monitor them closely and interact with the public appropriately.

Real-time marketing strategies are hard to pin down, as the can vary from brand to brand. A sports-oriented brand might have a different effective strategy than a technology-oriented one. However, what unites digital savvy brands is the usage of social media to market in real-time.